Volume 17

On the last day of February 2000, coal miner John Price told coworkers in Aberdeen, Australia, 'If I'm not here tomorrow, it's because Kath killed me.' Hours earlier, he had taken out a restraining order against his partner, Katherine Knight. Read the full story →

Two motorists on a country lane outside Manchester stopped for a horribly burned girl staggering toward the road. 'Help me. I'm Suzanne Capper,' she rasped — then named every one of her tormentors, exposing a week of horror at 97 Langworthy Road. Read the full story →

Pizza deliveryman Brian Wells robbed an Erie, Pennsylvania bank with a bomb locked around his neck, pleading with police that someone had forced him into a deadly scavenger hunt. Minutes later, on live television, the collar began to beep. Read the full story →

When David Lutz came home to his Reading, Pennsylvania apartment at 3:30 a.m., he found his roommate Stanley Detweiler decapitated — and the word 'REDRUM' scrawled on the wall in blood. Even the police chief asked: what kind of lunatic would do this? Read the full story →

Firefighters dousing a blaze at an abandoned Louisville house on Memorial Day weekend 1990 found the headless body of schoolteacher Kathleen Strange in the ruins. The search for the rest of the truth ended in the last place anyone expected: her own vegetable garden. Read the full story →

During a family night program at a St. Paul church in November 1981, six-year-old Cassie Hansen asked her mother for permission to use the bathroom just steps away. She never came back — and an abduction inside a sanctuary changed how the city thought about safety. Read the full story →

Nineteen-year-old Katie Poirier was working the late shift alone at D.J.'s Expressway Conoco in Moose Lake, Minnesota, in the spring of 1999 when a man walked in before closing. A grainy security tape captured what happened next — and launched a desperate search. Read the full story →

For twenty years, Chicago knew J.J. Jameson as a beloved poet, church historian, and community fixture. When state troopers walked into the Third Unitarian Church in 2005, they knew him as someone else: Norman Porter, a double murderer who had escaped a Massachusetts prison. Read the full story →

Schoolteacher Christine Vu was found bound and drowned in her own bathtub at Arlington, Texas's Peartree Apartments in 1996. When another young woman was found the same way, police realized a predator was choosing victims frighteningly close to home. Read the full story →

Lorraine Thorpe was fifteen, drifting between squalid flats, and caring for her alcoholic father among Ipswich's forgotten street drinkers in the summer of 2009. What unfolded inside that hidden world would force Britain to confront an almost unimaginable case. Read the full story →

For years, Ken McElroy terrorized the tiny farming town of Skidmore, Missouri, shrugging off charge after charge. Then, in broad daylight on the town's main street, someone shot the bully — in front of dozens of witnesses who all claimed to have seen nothing. Read the full story →

Millionaire Christopher Foster spent August 25, 2008, shooting clay pigeons and relaxing at a neighbor's barbecue with his wife Jill and daughter Kirstie. By sunrise, their Shropshire mansion, Osbaston House, was a smoldering ruin concealing the truth of his collapsing empire. Read the full story →

Six-year-old Randy Brown was too shy to go anywhere with strangers — but Justin Fox wasn't a stranger. Neighbors in Corpus Christi thought nothing of seeing the familiar young man alongside the first-grader walking home from school in January 1976. Read the full story →